How fluid?

[Chris Harris]

I am reworking a page that has graphic on the left side. A menu is
translucent and sits over the graphic. I have used a copy of the background
that is faded and de saturated behind the menu to give the translucent
effect. To acheive this I have to size and position the menu and graphic
using absolute units (px).

The graphic is around 180 px wide. I don't have a problem with making this
fixed as I think that most people will have enough real estate in their
browser to still display the rest of the page content, contained in a div to
the right of the graphic, which is fluid.

The menu is constructed using a UL so works well in text browsers or non CSS
browsers which won't display the graphics as all.

What I am wondering is: Is this sort of design approach acceptable within
modern best practice?

I know ideally that the whole page should be fluid, but is this sort of
thing an acceptable compromise?

Thoughts anyone?

CJH

 

[spaghetti]

I know ideally that the whole page should be fluid, but is this sort of
thing an acceptable compromise?

This newsgroup is full of purists, and it's simply not a pure approach.
You'll be flooded with lots of links and discussions on why it's bad. So
that's your answer according to most everyone here: it's not an acceptable
compromise.

In my opinion, I feel it's fine. Why? It's in a stylesheet specified for use
on *screens* which map things out using pixels. Your graphics are digital,
and graphics are important to make your site look nice and sell. I think
using pixels to place things in a medium like this is appropriate.

Nothing is utopian yet. Browsers simply aren't smart enough to make things
as flexible and elegant as we would like. Web standards are making things
better and that's great. A modern sensible approach to web design is
wonderful too. But we can all only go so far before we start killing our
loved ones in frustration...

 

[spaghetti]

Maybe this tutorial that I am working on will give you some better ideas
of how to do translucency:

http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/Documents/html_tutorial/translucency/exampl
e.html

I love these approaches and have used them before. But it's very very tricky
to get it looking right on specific backgrounds/colors. The other issue I
had is it can look really crappy at lower resolutions. It's very subjective.
Sometimes it's the best approach, other times it's not. Nice tutorial
though, I never thought about Technique 3.

 

[CJ]

Maybe this tutorial that I am working on will give you some better ideas
of how to do translucency:

http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/Documents/html_tutorial/translucency/example.html

Good tutorial Toby. I was already working down the gif route, but hadn't
thought of option 3. That means that the few % who give a $&^t will be able
to see my nice translucent pngs after all ;-)

However this still doesn't get around the problem of positioning the menu on
the graphic. I can do everything with % but browsers resizing of images is
pretty crap, well that's the laws of physics in action! I'll give it a go
and see how it looks and feels.

I tend to agree with spaghetti on this one, and usually I'm a stuck in the
mud standards person